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DAVID BEERS QUINN AND THE HAKLUYT SOCIETY
Professor Glyndwr Williams
David Beers Quinn was born in Dublin on 24 April 1909, and grew up in the small town of Clara. He graduated from Queen’s University, Belfast, in 1931, and three years later received his PhD from King’s College, London for a dissertation on early Tudor Ireland. He held posts at Southampton, Belfast and Swansea before his appointment to the Andrew Geddes and John Rankin Chair of Modern History at the University of Liverpool, which he held until his retirement in 1976. Until then his research was carried out alongside a heavy teaching and administrative load, with sabbaticals few and far between. Retirement for David Quinn was a nominal affair, and his awesome programme of research, travel and publication continued until shortly before his death on 19 March 2002. A bibliography of his writings issued in 1993 ran to 176 items, ranging from short essays to multi-volume editions, and more publications have appeared since. Most scholars feel greatly honoured if they are recipients of a single Festschrift; David Quinn received three, in 1979, 1987 and 1994. To recite the long roll-call of his honours, fellowships and visiting appointments would alone take up much of my allotted time.
David Quinn’s main fields of historical interest were summed up in the subtitle of the first Festschrift presented to him, ‘English Activities in Ireland, the Atlantic and America 1480-1650'. He saw his life’s work, he once said, as trying ‘to make sense of obscure happenings on both sides of the Atlantic’. To accomplish this, he set to work collecting, annotating and publishing the relevant documents; for the story of English beginnings across the Atlantic was afflicted by ill-directed speculation arising from what Quinn termed ‘a kind of Parkinson’s law of historical study ... the less material there is, the larger the number of deductions that can be made from it.’ His first major publication that indicated the direction of his life’s work was an edition of The Voyages and Colonising Enterprises of Sir Humphrey Gilbert, issued in 1940 (Quinn liked to describe how his precious manuscript was delivered to Edward Lynam at the British Museum just as its holdings were being sent to safety as war approached, and was published at the time of the Battle of Britain). The two-volume edition had three aspects that indicated things to come. It dealt with a figure who had interests in both Ireland and America; its index was compiled by Alison Quinn, David’s wife, helpmate and collaborator for more than fifty years; and it was published by the Hakluyt Society, which would issue in all ten of his volumes. 1940 was not an auspicious year for publication of an academic work, and reviews of Quinn’s edition were few and far between; but he must have been pleased - and relieved - by a favourable one in the Mariner’s Mirror by the formidable E. G. R. Taylor. Gilbert, with his military and colonizing activities in Ireland in the late 1560s, formed a bridge between Ireland and America, and for Quinn his plans were ‘the first stage in a series of attempts that were necessary before the English settlements could be firmly planted in America’. There was, however, a coda to this: ‘His method of waging war was to devastate the country, killing every living creature encountered by his troops ... His views on the treatment of subject peoples, from a man who might well have formed the first English settlement among the North American Indians, are of some interest.’ Looking back at the edition, more than sixty years later, one recognizes certain characteristics of David Quinn’s work. The Introduction was more than a hundred pages long, almost a biography of Gilbert in its own right, and much longer than the Society norm. The volume included no fewer than 142 documents, drawn from thirteen different archives, ranging from the Public Record Office to the ‘Records of the Incorporation of Weavers, Tuckers and Shearmen, Exeter’, and they were heavily annotated. And all this was completed by David Quinn’s thirtieth birthday.
After the war, Quinn began work on the early English voyages to that part of the American mainland which the English called ‘Virginia’, and this resulted in the publication by the Hakluyt Society in 1955 of another two-volume edition, The Roanoke Voyages, 1584-1590. It was, one reviewer wrote, ‘the greatest landmark in this field of study since 1589', and it provided a model that many Hakluyt Society editors were to follow. In his ‘Reflections’ Quinn tells the story of how ‘[R. A.] Skelton had just taken over the editorship of Hakluyt Society publications and with his encouragement and help we set out to shape the volumes ... into a new pattern, one that would raise the level of detailed scholarship of the society’s famous series and present it in a more attractive form. I think we did this, if comparison is made between publications before and after 1955.’ Again, there was a lengthy introduction - seventy-three pages - but that was not all, for the general introduction was followed by separate introductions to the twelve sections of documents, a device which brought text and commentary closer together. Now readers could follow the fortunes, and misfortunes, of the colonists step by step, until their last mysterious disappearance. At the end, as John White wrote to Richard Hakluyt in one of the last documents printed in the edition, he was left to commit ‘the reliefe of my discomfortable company, the planters of Virginia, to the merciful help of the Almighty’. In all, there were 159 documents, gathered from twenty-three archives. In addition, there were appendices by Quinn and by other scholars on the archaeology of the Roanoke settlements, and on the Powhatan language of the Algonquian group, while a list and analysis of John White’s drawings were a precursor to the marvellous edition of 1964 by Quinn and Paul Hulton, The American Drawings of John White. Also published by the Hakluyt Society in the same year as The Roanoke Voyages was the first volume of J. C. Beaglehole’s mighty edition of The Journals of Captain James Cook: the Voyage of the Endeavour, published in the Society’s Extra Series. In retrospect, 1955 appears as an annus mirabilis in the Hakluyt Society’s publishing history.
The younger Hakluyt looms large in The Roanoke Voyages. ‘In all this’, Quinn wrote, ‘it is the younger Richard Hakluyt who is the great initiator, selecting for publication texts with a direct and indirect bearing on the Virginia enterprise, carrying through in them both broad and narrowly-based propaganda campaigns, and subjecting them to a detailed, scrupulous editing which is well illustrated in the collated texts which follow. It is to him that we owe the survival of practically everything we know of the voyages themselves’. Such comments pointed to a future work - The Hakluyt Handbook. By now David was a considerable force in the inner councils of the Hakluyt Society. He became a member of Council in 1950, was re-elected in 1957, and became a Vice-President in 1960. On and off Council he urged the necessity of up-to-date scholarly editions of Richard Hakluyt’s works. A step in this direction came with the publication in the Extra Series in 1965 of Hakluyt’s first great collection, The Principall Navigations Voiages and Discoveries of the English Nation of 1589. It was a facsimile edition, with an introduction by Quinn and R. A. Skelton, and with an award-winning index of 140 pages by Alison Quinn. Two years later, Quinn brought out - although not for the Hakluyt Society - a facsimile edition of Hakluyt’s Divers Voyages of 1582, and his introduction to this showed that both these editions were for him second-best. Like the 1965 edition, he wrote, ‘an attempt has been made to render the facsimile edition fully accessible to the student and scholar by an introductory survey of the sources and bibliography of the books and by a modern index, though without anticipating the modern scholarly edition which is clearly necessary ...’ Later he commented on his edition of The Principall Navigations that it was ‘a far from complete substitute for a fully annotated version’.
Sandwiched between the facsimile editions was an announcement in the Annual Report for 1966 that Quinn was to prepare with the help of other scholars a Hakluyt Handbook. ‘No date can yet be assigned to its publication’, added the Report, cautiously and sensibly. In the event, The Hakluyt Handbook was issued in 1974, not bad going for a collaborative work that brought together twenty scholars, and had suffered a heavy blow with the death of R. A. Skelton in 1970. Apart from editing the work, Quinn, often with Alison as co-author, contributed seven of the essays that appeared in the two volumes. There is not time here to describe fully a work that investigated in depth the many aspects of Hakluyt and his collections, but it is perhaps worth noting that in Quinn’s eyes the Handbook was a step on the road to a larger if still elusive objective. In his essay on ‘Hakluyt’s Reputation’ he noted that ‘the formidable task of producing a critical edition of Hakluyt still remains a challenge which the Hakluyt Society has never, so far, managed to meet .. .It will be unfortunate if some further attempt is not made to grapple with the problems of a fully explanatory edition of the work by which Hakluyt is rightly and most universally known, The Principall Navigations (1598-1600)’. Two years earlier, in the Society’s annual lecture, ‘Richard Hakluyt and his Followers’, Quinn had warned that such an edition would probably run to twenty volumes and would need a massive subsidy.
There were two further Quinn editions to come for the Hakluyt Society. The first, edited with Alison, was The English New England Voyages, 1602-1608, published in 1983. It had all the Quinn hallmarks: a long general introduction (111 pages), separate introductions to the thirteen sections of documents, and several appendices. It was a difficult volume to put together, for many of the records relating to the ventures were lost. As the editors explained, compared to the Roanoke enterprise the story of the early New England voyages ‘is much more episodic, much more confined to specific and separate phases of exploration and to very limited information on the beginnings of settlement. But because we have a series of bird’s-eye views of the voyages of 1602, 1603, 1605 and 1607 we have enough to establish something of a coherent series and to maintain a varied pattern of interest, even if we lack so much ...’ And then, in 1993, in their eighty-fifth year, David and Alison produced their last volume of Richard Hakluyt’s writings, a facsimile edition of his Discourse on Western Planting, issued in the Extra Series, complete with a Commentary of more than sixty pages. It was, in the words of Paul Hair, the Society’s President at the time, the crowning achievement in a lifetime’s work on Hakluyt and his associates.
The ten Hakluyt Society volumes were only part of Quinn’s edited publications. An outstanding work was the five-volume set he prepared with the help of Alison Quinn and Susan Hillier, New American World: a Documentary History of North America from the Earliest Times to 1612 (1979). This ambitious project offered the chance to bring the Spaniards and the French into the picture, for despite his work on the first English seamen and settlers in the New World, Quinn insisted that other nations were more important in this period. As he explained, ‘if I have tried to enlarge the picture of what the English did in these early days, it was as much to show how little they accomplished as how much’. His later critical comments about the lack of annotations to the text, and other problems with the publication of New American World, make one realise how much David gained from the standard format of the Hakluyt Society, where annotations, appendices and other elements of critical apparatus were taken for granted. Even so, there were limits. In an aside in his ‘Reflections’, Quinn mentioned that The English New England Voyages appeared with only (my emphasis) 2,000 footnotes - that is, about four to a page - rather than the 4,000 he and Alison had collected!
In his introduction to New American World Quinn explained how he used documents to tell a story, for as he insisted, ‘exploration history is by its nature narrative history in the main’. He went on to expand on this in words that could apply to his Hakluyt Society volumes:
The documents in these volumes tell a long story. Many parts of it we still know only in scraps and inferences. Most of it is formal, reflecting the activities of European bureaucracy. But gradually it becomes a living story of men probing, men challenged by forces and conditions they had not imagined to exist, men gradually making sense of an unknown land, drawing maps of it, and occasionally drawing objects and peoples...Few of the early discoverers bared their feelings too openly about what they felt. At the same time most of them could tell a story, and this story and that story forms most of the hundreds of documents in these volumes, so that we ourselves can supply imaginatively, by scholarship and by sensitivity, the context of their achievement.
One otherwise enthusiastic reviewer of Quinn’s New American World lamented that ‘the only thing missing from his writing is the Gaelic wit and sparkle of his conversation’. I do not think that one could accept that as a general complaint. I give you just two examples from his England and the Discovery of America which seem to me to characterize those familiar, quirky thrusts David delighted in. His opening paragraph contained what seemed to be an apologia, but clearly is not, at least not in any conventional way.
This book is mainly about the English and their part, or presumed part, in the discovery of North America and its eventual exploitation and settlement. It is a risky theme for an Irishman to undertake: he is liable in Ireland to be thought biased toward that sister isle which has not always seemed part of the same family; or in England he may well be thought to have a natural desire to keep in his place any Englishman who comes within his view. It is certainly not my intention to give the English more than their due. At the same time it is clear that, however much we debate about the details, they took a significant and exciting part in the discovery of North America ....
And, a little later, a true cri de coeur:
In no historical field has there been more speculation - much of it of an almost meaningless character - than the discovery of America ... Fantasy-building is a perfectly acceptable human activity, but its involvement in the construction of alleged historical sequences introduces an element of pure fiction which must be unacceptable to the historian.
Mention of England and the Discovery of America reminds one that Quinn did not write only for the specialist. As early as 1947 he had produced Raleigh and the British Empire for a popular readership, and over the years he wrote single-volume histories of early American exploration, put together collections of his articles, and contributed to some fine illustrated books and atlases. In 1985 he presented the story of England’s early colonizing attempts in a book published by the University of North Carolina Press under the engaging title, Set Fair for Roanoke. And my emphasis here on his published work should not obscure the impact his lectures had on audiences both in Britain and in the United States. Whatever the form of publication, he was a stickler for accuracy. In the early 1970s a very expensive volume was held up at page proof because of a disagreement between Quinn and myself over the spelling of the name Algonkian/Algonquian. I was delighted to find that in The Roanoke Voyages the name appeared on one page with a ‘k’ and on another with ‘qu’ - the bone of contention between us. David took my mischievous reference in his stride, and of course won the day.
In general terms he was an advocate of the importance to the historian of visiting the sites he was writing about, and one of my favourite pieces among his less academic writings is the description of his three visits to North Carolina in 1948, 1957 and 1959 to see for himself the Outer Banks. Such forays were not without their perils. At Chapel Hill in 1948 David was persuaded by Chris Crittenden to talk to the Chamber of Commerce about the charter of 1663, and before the meeting met the historian and archivist R. D. W. Connor. I let Quinn take up the story:
He [Connor] assured me that as fellow Irishmen we must have a drink together r... He brought me a glass of the wine of the country, bourbon, which had, he assured me, plenty of branch water in it. However, there was much less water than whiskey and, though I got through the lunch and remember Chris speaking, I was well under the influence myself by this time and never to this day knew what I said about the charter, whether it made sense or nonsense. Chris was too kind to tell me, so I feared the worst.
David Quinn enlisted the help of such disciplines as anthropology and archaeology long before this became fashionable among historians. In 1965 he set out his model for a critical edition of exploration texts. ‘This will require the collaboration, ideally, of European and non-European historians, each working from his own cultural standpoint towards a full interpretation, and aided by scientific specialists.’ This was not always easy to put into practice, and looking back in late career Quinn suspected that his approach had ‘almost certainly been too European-centred’.
It was altogether appropriate that in 1982 David Quinn became President of the Hakluyt Society, a post he held for five years. During his tenure the Society kept up with its full publication programme, although he would be the first to point to the Honorary Secretaries and Administrative Assistant of that time as being largely responsible for the smooth running of the production line. But there is no doubt that he stamped his own personality on meetings of the Council. Whether the discussion was about financial matters or - I suspect a subject closer to David’s own heart - proposals for future volumes, he held firm opinions. Although my memory of this time is that he was a far from silent President, his reactions were not always expressed verbally. There were occasions when a slow, slightly incredulous half-smile as he listened to or read some proposal which failed to meet with his total approval gave the game away. After his Presidency, he remained on Council as a Vice-President, and even as his health faltered he continued to make the journey down from Liverpool for Council meetings.
Of the direction and importance of the life’s work of this self-deprecating scholar there can be no doubt. He saw himself, he once said, as ‘a historical work horse, clearing the way through documentary tangles for others to follow’. I prefer to apply to David Beers Quinn the words of Richard Hakluyt himself: ‘I have portrayed out in rude lineaments my Western Atlantis or America’. |
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